And we walked together for a while. Into places we’d known separately and back out again with new words and phrases and paragraphs and endnotes we immediately wanted to forget. After I proved to them that they were wrong, that I was better on my own, I walked away.

Walking is the way. It asks nothing from you. It is no accomplishment on its own. It’s process. Plan your routes, set along your path, check the map. Or don’t, and just keep walking until it’s time to lie down. Then get up and do it some more. It’s better not to think if you can help it, but if it happens, and with it you feel your mourning kick the wind out of you and fold you in half, you can trust that it will pass. Just keep moving. When the body stays rooted, the blood runs tepid.

My mother had me, her first child, when she was twenty-five. I was a few days away from thirty-five, had no children, and I’d lost my mother some months before. Oh, I knew where she was: alive, very much the person she had always been. But I’d lost her. Rather, she had closed the door, shut me out, shut herself up in the home she had made with my father, the silent partner in this shunning business. I love you, she said, but I love my God more. In anguish, I repeated this to my walking partner, whose own mother was also Christian but in a way that insisted she understand her child’s difference, to recognize over time that her beautiful daughter was, despite expectations, no longer her daughter but still her beautiful child. I bet my parents would say that too if I asked them, they said. But I hadn’t asked.

My mother had always needed to hold me at arm’s length. But when I lost her—and by extension, my father—a lifetime of detritus was unearthed, a hot pile of rotting fruit and buried bones sucked clean of their meat.